Expressive Modulation of Neutral Visual Speech

Shaw, Felix (2015) Expressive Modulation of Neutral Visual Speech. Doctoral thesis, University of East Anglia.

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Abstract

The need for animated graphical models of the human face is commonplace in
the movies, video games and television industries, appearing in everything from
low budget advertisements and free mobile apps, to Hollywood blockbusters
costing hundreds of millions of dollars. Generative statistical models of
animation attempt to address some of the drawbacks of industry standard
practices such as labour intensity and creative inflexibility.
This work describes one such method for transforming speech animation curves
between different expressive styles. Beginning with the assumption that
expressive speech animation is a mix of two components, a high-frequency
speech component (the content) and a much lower-frequency expressive
component (the style), we use Independent Component Analysis (ICA) to
identify and manipulate these components independently of one another. Next
we learn how the energy for different speaking styles is distributed in terms of
the low-dimensional independent components model. Transforming the
speaking style involves projecting new animation curves into the lowdimensional
ICA space, redistributing the energy in the independent
components, and finally reconstructing the animation curves by inverting the
projection.
We show that a single ICA model can be used for separating multiple expressive
styles into their component parts. Subjective evaluations show that viewers can
reliably identify the expressive style generated using our approach, and that they
have difficulty in identifying transformed animated expressive speech from the
equivalent ground-truth.

Item Type:	Thesis (Doctoral)
Faculty \ School:	Faculty of Science > School of Computing Sciences
Depositing User:	Users 2259 not found.
Date Deposited:	28 Jan 2016 09:13
Last Modified:	28 Jan 2016 09:13
URI:	https://ueaeprints.uea.ac.uk/id/eprint/56812
DOI:

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